How many keywords?

[bingymon]

This is just the discussion I was looking for, and as you can see I'm new at this so now I'm picking all your brains.
I just gathered over a hundred keywords from an email I sent out company wide for suggestions. I want to use all or most of them, but surfing around at other sites has led me to believe I don't really need to include all of them. I wouldn't really think so, but is there even a limit to the amount of keywords to use in your meta tags?

[Mike_Mackin]

You may use about 1024 characters BUT you may want to focus the theme of your page and use MUCH less.

[bingymon]

1024 characters does seem like a lot.
Thanks Mike.
I'll get rid of some. What about repeating the same word like "keyword" & "keywords" or "meta keywords". Would it work just as well to use "meta, keywords"?

[Marcia]

Hi, bingymon! You asked:

"What about repeating the same word like "keyword" & "keywords" or "meta keywords". Would it work just as well to use "meta, keywords"?"

It's not 100% clear what you mean by that, but you will only want to do ONE keywords meta tag, which is not of prime importance anyway, since it's the page text you need to have your keywords in.

You'll need the title, meta description tag, and meta keyword tag, one of each. Here are some basic articles for you to read:

[searchengineworld.com...]

The ones under "Design and Development" and "Meta Tags" might be where you'd best start for a good foundation. You'll probably want to choose a few of the best keyword phrases and use them across the site, and concentrate on specifics for given pages.

What Mr. Mackin said:
"You may use about 1024 characters BUT you may want to focus the theme of your page and use MUCH less."

That's what to do.

[Brett_Tabke]

Stems and/or plurals are very difficult to decide. I try to limit myself to only three occurences of the keyword in either plural or stem form:

fish, fishing, fisherman.

That is about as far I will take it. If I need to focus on any more kw's, I will build a new page.

I kinda had the idea in my head that earlier this spring, Alta was knocking down your page a bit if it found more stems. Whether there was really the case or bogus data that was really saying something else is anyones guess.

And commas are ignored in metatags.

[bingymon]

Thanks Brett!
I didn't even have to respond to Marcia. You cleared it up for me.
Thanks all for your responses to this somewhat simple question. I followed your advice and uploaded the new meta tags this morning. Now I just gotta work on getting the traffic rolling in:)